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After all networked smartphones and computers were placed under control of the regime, resistance hackers relied on microcontrollers harvested from ordinary household devices like smart lamps and vape pens to slowly rebuild the covert but resilient mesh internetwork that became known as FreeNet.

Congratulations, welcome to the dev team of Collapse OS. https://collapseos.org/

Now they are more focused on supply chain break down but your scenario would also be valid.

When I think of what's out there I think of cheapy ARMs, maybe STM32 knock offs. Honestly the F103C8T6 is so prolific that's probably a solid chunk of all processors in existence. And then things like ESP32s. So to not see ARM or Tenscillica on there is a bit weird. But maybe I'm reading too much into it and it's more of a thought experiment

Looking at that list, collapse OS seems to cater to 8-bit only. It’s also aimes at “ built from scavenged parts” boards. I’ve often come across Hitachi h8, Blackfin, PIC, avr, the occasional ARM and other controllers in the wild. But they all have one thing in common: the flash is locked and inaccessible without some jtag tools. The only times you’ll see external flash (winbond & co) is with an fpga or a controller who’s had his otp memory configured with a bootloader.

I often re-purpose scavenged board because of their useful layout, but only after swapping the controller for a programmable one. The notion of scavenging the controllers themselves… far less practical as you think.

I mean there are countless examples of IoT devices getting hacked because they didn't do that but I guess

The iot devices are hacked on the application layer. You have a controller running some linux distro and you work your way in over tty/telnet/eth. That’s an entirely different ballgame than repurposing 8-bit avr or 32-bit STM microcontrollers.

My first time seeing Collapse OS as well, but I'm guessing the decision is based in attempting to contain complexity.

Seems like the author has a related projected Dusk OS that is more portable:

https://duskos.org/

https://duskos.org/

The future is Forth? We're... Forthed!

My dad used to write Forth ... for fun.

I find it ironic that post-apocalypse we must rely on a language that is post-apocalypse.

Like monkeys gathering at the monolith…

Someone write a novel please. Not sure who will be more appropriate: Stross (more fun?), Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).

> Stephenson (more of a slog through the first 600 pages, then an abrupt 180 and frenetic action in the last 100 with newly introduced, yet game-changing characters?).

With the six pages in the middle where he may as well say "Right, I had to learn a lot of algebra for compiler optimisation to make this bit work, so now you get to learn it too"

Fits well with William Gibson. The Turing-police will visit anybody who consumes more than 5 yearly vapes.

I see there's a TV adaptation of Neuromancer coming out.

I'm a little disappointed that they didn't have it directed by an AI reconstruction of David Lynch, because that would have been so very fitting.

Stross, because you get the added value of seeing him hate any new concepts he uses 10+ years later.

Cory Doctorow perhaps? At first glance I thought the OP was quoting him.

This was literally a plot element in "Big Brother" - the protagonists use modded xboxes to create a mesh network to avoid government surveillance.

Agreed on the ridiculous page counts, but I don't find Stephenson's pages a slog. Exhausting, maybe. There's a lot going on. But he makes me laugh. I'd like to meet that guy.

I really love Stephenson's world building and detailed research, but I get the feeling he himself gets bored with the book at a certain point :)

So I vote Stross

It's not the greatest piece of fiction ever written, but Robert Evans of Behind the Bastards podcast has a pretty easy read[1]. It's also offered as a free audiobook read by him as a series of podcasts.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Revolution

Might not be what you want if you want more technical & hacking versus dystopian capitalism collapse. But he gets bonus points for Texas getting nuked as a lore point.

Then a end midsentence and a black page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peace_War closest you can get to vape insurgency

The FreeNet is an amazing and wonderful solution to the current problem of a free network. At least for me :)

Maybe this is not such a bad side of history to be on after all.

Just curious: if you wanted to do something like that, but prevent a... thermal event, how would you protect an experimental battery realistically? Build a brick enclosure? A fire safe?

If you have the space for it, just put it outdoors 5' from anything flammable and you're good to go. This is not a hobby for folks in apartments unfortunately.

I've had one of my DIY ebike batteries short and fail spectacularly at near full charge and was able to push it with a broom out of the garage into the driveway before any damage was done. Now I have a bench with wheels that I can take into the driveway for initial testing.

Sounds like it’s also not a hobby for people with neighbors.

At least not neighbors likely to be alarmed when their neighbors run out of their garage at odd hours of the night, pushing a flaming cart and screaming "fire!"...

Everyone has neighbors. Just depends how close they are.

Current building regulations in the UK are moving towards outside storage of batteries now because of NMC's having a high tendency to combust. The battery management systems do detect a lot of issues, thermal and shorts but at some point I think government is going to force these to be on the outside of houses.

The right answer is LifePO4 for home storage, does not combust and has good enough density.

Agreed. I think that about ten years out, when solid state batteries are widely available, lithium-ion batteries bigger than laptop-sized will be prohibited.

Once we have solid state cells I really hope the entire industry moves over to them and we just have solid state, LFP and Sodium Ion, all nicely non combustable chemistries that offer different price, power and weight density trade offs.

Solid-state batteries will never be suitable for all applications, even if they should suffice for the most frequent of them.

Batteries with liquid electrolyte will always be able to provide greater power (i.e. greater current) within certain physical constraints. This should not matter for smartphones or laptops, but it should matter for many things with motors.

Whats going on with liquid electrolytes that ensure they "always be able to provide greater power"?

Much greater effective surface area.

In a battery with a liquid electrolyte, the interfacial layer between the electrode and the electrolyte is fractal in shape, created by a carefully engineered chemical reaction between the electolyte and the electrode to maximize the surface area. You can't really do that with any solid battery chemistry we are currently studying.

I think the issue is overblown. Most users who need high power also benefit from high energy, and you can always run more batteries in parallel.

It's the common problem with almost anything in physics or chemistry.

The Good Stuff has some horrible flaw that makes it incredibly dangerous.

When we invented refrigerators first, they used ammonia as a refrigerant which was awesome at moving heat around. It's still used industrially but people die from ammonia leaks. Then they swapped it for freon, which was just about as good at moving heat around, but rotted holes in the ozone layer. So they got replaced with R-134 which wasn't as bad for the ozone layer (but still not great), slightly more toxic, and still quite nasty stuff to handle.

At present the best bet for refrigerants turns out to be good old propane, which if anything is a little too good at moving heat around (and your evaporator will freeze if you're not careful), reasonably non-toxic (don't breathe it in, but unlike ammonia a tiny amount in a room won't dissolve your lungs), and its only real downside is that it burns. People are worried about using C3 or C5 (pentane) refrigerant in cars, but the worst that would happen is you'd release about a deodorant can's worth of the stuff into something that's already on fire and contains maybe 70 litres of petrol. Your petrol tank is a bomb, made of a leaky plastic bucket full of explosive. The aircon having a cupful of LPG in it is not your problem in an accident.

Thus it is with batteries.

It turns out that one of the best kinds of batteries you can make in terms of longevity, power density, and stability is a couple of bits of lead in a bucket of sulphuric acid. They work great. They're in production today, and will probably be forever. Your car has at least one (mine has three, a massive one up front for starting the engine and a couple of smaller ones in the back for running things like the radios and inverter when I'm stopped).

However, lead compounds are pretty nasty, sulphuric acid is pretty nasty, they're heavy, they will stop working if you leave them discharged, and in general people would like something smaller, less corrosive, and less dependent on digging up vast areas of China to pull poisonous dust out of the ground.

So we have NiCads (oh dear, cadmium, one of the nastiest poisonous metals because it's poisonous all by itself - it doesn't need to be complexed to something organic to get in you), then NiMH (cheaper, non-toxic, and more-or-less a drop-in replacement for NiCads in any given application). Then we've got the various rechargeable lithium batteries which can do exciting things when damaged.

But for high power density, low cost, and and high current applications where you don't have to worry about carrying them or tipping them over, you're going to be stuck with lead in a bucket of acid for a while I suspect.

> They're in production today, and will probably be forever.

I suspect their days are numbered, because they have become _far_ more expensive to dispose of, and that's only going one direction.

> But for high power density, low cost, and and high current applications where you don't have to worry about carrying them or tipping them over, you're going to be stuck with lead in a bucket of acid for a while I suspect.

You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications.

> I suspect their days are numbered, because they have become _far_ more expensive to dispose of, and that's only going one direction.

They're insanely easy to recycle. You melt lead, you recast it into new plates. Sulphuric acid is very easy to make, and we need to make a lot of it as part of the process of making fertilisers.

> You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications.

Every telephone exchange you have ever dialled through is powered by massive lead-acid battery, with cells about the size of a decent microwave oven.

>> But for high power density

> You'd think, but they _haven't_ seen a lot of use in, say, grid-scale applications

Their power density is integer multiples worse than Li-Ion no matter what you look at. Not to mention numerous other problems. So it's not surprising at all.

> Their power density is integer multiples worse than Li-Ion no matter what you look at. Not to mention numerous other problems. So it's not surprising at all.

Yes, but you can use them in areas where you can't use Li-Ion.

They seem to be 10 years out forever.

It's usually not the batteries causing fire. A broken fuse. Or something else. I can create a pretty heavy welder from my 1000 amps of 48v system.

Shameless plug: we're building a repairable e-bike battery where you can use your own cells at https://infinite-battery.com

We worked on a very sturdy casing, with some specific features to release pressure and limit the fire event propagating cell to cell, you can check it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NXXfCA2CY

I'm confused why your value proposition is that you can replace individual cells but your website also says it's recommended to replace all cells at once. Isn't that the same as the current situation where we have to buy a new battery assembly rather than replace the failed cells?

> When an E-bike battery fails, 90% of the time, its just 1 or 2 cells that are dead inside or a single electronic component. But since traditional batteries are spot welded and glued, there is no chance to replace the faulty part and you need to replace the complete battery.The infinite battery is different. It uses a technology that makes it easy and safe to replace any parts, including lithium-ion cells. It doesn't require any specific tools nor knowledge. It takes less than 10 minutes.

> For safety and durability, it is recommended to change all cells at once.

https://infinite-battery.com/products/infinite-battery?_pos=...

You should definitely replace all cells together - a new cell will have a different capacity and could "charge" an adjacent older cell to rebalance, causing a fire (but a good BMS won't allow that - on the other hand you'll be limited by your weakest cells despite having put some new ones in)

For me the value proposition would be to avoid what happened with my previous ebike: after 3 years I wanted a new battery as the old one was on its last legs, and it wasn't produced anymore. Or what's happening with my current ebike: to avoid the same story with the battery, I am thinking of buying an extra one now while it's still produced, and it's outrageously expensive (550EUR for roughly 500Wh, which is about 7..10x the price of the cells if you are a careful buyer).

(You can fit a new battery to any bike with (sometimes lots of) extra work, but esp. my previous one had a weird solution where it slid into a rail above the rear wheel and it would have been a PITA to reengineer.)

So yeah if their thing works I'd consider a bike using it, on economical grounds mainly.

Exactly! That's precisely why we designed the battery, to let people be in control of their own stuff!

Our batteries have now be running for close to 3 years on shared mobility ebikes, so they are well-tested indeed! If you want more infos, send us an email at contact@gouach.com :)

At 199EUR without the cells, I'm _almost_ tempted to go for it. It's a bit steep but the savings on the cells would already make the whole thing overall viable. If it had the ability to charge from USB-C as a contingency solution, it would be an impulse buy.

Indeed! We've been asked for the USB-C quite a bit so we might do that in a future version, but it increases the BOM price for our shared mobility fleet customers which are quite price sensitive!

Indeed it's 199 eur, but it's high-quality, certified, comes with a waterproof and fireproof casing, connected, with real-time safety alerts, and when you'll eventually need to change the cells, you'll only pay 50 eur to refill your battery!

Compared to that, an equivalent Bosch battery goes for 500 to 700 eur (for the same quality). We're even compatible with Bosch gen 2/3/4 (non-smart)

Thanks for your message!

So the value prop are multiple things:

- you can indeed change the cells! When the industry matures, we might have a "second-life cell cycling" path where old cells are re-tested and matched so you could switch individual cells, but for now, as those "matched cells" aren't widely available we recommend you switch everything to new cells (this would cost an end-user about $50 rather than buying a new battery for $200/$300)

- our battery is also very high quality (passes all certifications, waterproof, fireproof, connected, with safety alerts)

- even if you need to change all the cells sometimes, getting back "pristine cells" rather than "damaged, welded and unwelded cells" will allow for multiple things: putting them in a second-life cycle for eg. energy storage batteries, and even better recycling (since you can get cells out of the casing, the recycling process is even more efficient)

- now the cells are perhaps 1/3rd the cost of a battery, so all things being equal, you'd rather be able to change all cells than throw in the trash the old battery

- we also have seen some batteries fail because of broken electronics, etc, which are just $30 to replace, and our battery makes it extremely simple to do so

Ahh, I get it now. Maybe you can improve the wording around this to make it less suggestive that your value proposition is I can change one cell when it fails. That's not safe. The value prop is I can change for a new set of cells cheaply when I get a failure in my current set.

You're going from when one cell fails, change the entire battery assembly, including any management electronics, case etc

To

When one cell fails, just get a fresh set of cells, at a fraction of the cost of a new battery assembly.

In the future, you also expect working cells to be circulated back into second-life use. Your casing makes this much more likely.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I payed 1$ in July 2024 to reserve a launch-day discount. I never received any emails from Gouach after the receipt. You moved from Kickstarter to you own website.

Are you actually shipping to costumers?

I was super excited back then about your product and company, but the rebrandings and lack of communication made me wary.

Yes we are since a few months! Your email might have got lost? Please send us an email at contact@gouach.com with your details!

Are these rated? My local bike shop won't sell anything without that specific safety rating. I forgot the exact number.

I've seen that more and more common lately

Yes! We have the EU certification and are undergoing the UL certification, it should be complete at the end of the year!

Nice. My bike shop will only sell batteries or bikes with UL because their insurance requires it.

Good luck!

Nice.

Thanks! Appreciated

That’s pretty cool, but it took me quite a while on my phone to figure out what I need. Been doing e-bikes since 2007. Also, the little plus next to the shop was confusing to somebody that had a beer. I think your product is hot, thanks for making something that the world needs.

Thanks for your feedback! Would appreciate any tip you have in making the website more clear, please send us any feedback at contact@gouach.com !

Ideally build it in away from your house, as others have said, but in terms of actual safety systems:

-get a high quality BMS from a reputable source, it should supports current limits and thermal probes - configure current limits with as much overhead as possible, the less you drive them, the cooler they'll stay - make sure you have sufficient thermal probes inside key points in the pack(s) and that they're configured in the BMS to cut draw - add thermal fuses as well, knowing where to put these is important, too - house the packs so to minimize fire risk and cascading issues, especially if space is not a concern

A runaway NMC battery is notoriously difficult to extinguish, so the best thing to do is to not do it and investigate LFP prismatic cells instead.

Many people building home storage batteries use a shed a few meters away from their home.

what's a NMC battery?

Nickel Manganese Cobalt - a type of Lithium battery chemistry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_nickel_manganese_cobal...

Nickel manganese cadmium maybe?

Doesn't matter. If you try any of these techniques your insurer will still void your home insurance if your house catches fire.

Can you cite a single instance where home insurance claim was refused because the homeowner was stupid?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-06/couple-denied-aami-ho...

Looks like that case was resolved to the policyholders satisfaction, so not a good example at all. Besides that, the denial was because they were, in actuality, not in compliance with their policy, not because they did something stupid. It was a stupid denial because the violation was extremely in the “well, technically” category, and had nothing to do with the loss.

https://www.insurancenews.com.au/daily/egg-side-hustle-claim...

Okay, I suppose I asked for that, exposing my US-centric thoughts. I meant in the US :).

In the US, insurance covers stupidity. At least once -- your insurer may drop you after they pay out. As long as you don't have an exclusion in the contract covering a particular type of stupidity, and you are not committing fraud, you will be covered.

Why?

Also, I’ve always had a rider in my contracts that said the insurer waives their right to not pay if I’m at fault. I don’t know why this rider even exists but I always get it since it was first offered to me years ago.

"Hello, State Farm? Yes, I'd like to put in a claim for my home insurance. My homemade electrical bomb exploded and my house- hello? Hello?!"

No, the "doesn't matter" issue is that they'll try to deny you when something else starts a fire.

Indeed. It's that "something else"'s fault that the fire started. You should blame them... only in this case: that's yourself.

What? Myself?

Are you still talking about the battery starting a fire, and saying that it's my fault rather than the battery's fault? Because that's not an "indeed". I'm talking about non-battery fires.

If you're on the same page as me, and talking about non-battery fires... What makes it my fault?? Are you saying any possible fire is my fault? With the implication that insurance shouldn't pay out for any fires ever??

Proper cooling seems to be the primary thing to do.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259017452...

Proper Home Storage systems are pretty safe:

https://www.bves.de/en/2024/12/17/study-home-batteries-fire-...

There are special containers for transport of (even damaged) lithium batteries, which don't look overly bulky:

https://www.zarges.com/en/solutions/transport-and-storage-of...

Small outbuilding. Concrete pad. Cinderblock walls. Sheet metal roof. Safe distance from anything important. Typical cost is $3000-$4000. Farms often have little buildings like this.

(There are pictures of such buildings online. Search is returning awful LLM-generated garbage landing pages, so I don't have a link.)

I think there’s not much you can do other than placing it very far away from the house. Those big packs just have way too much energy.

If it reaches thermal runaway... there's not much you can do. There's simply too much potential energy in the pack.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SweatyPalms/comments/1gbryd1/factor...

Throw it in a massive body of water is about as good as you can do until the energy is depleted. (Also, making a human perform the puncture to initiate a violent chemical reaction is WILD. Do better)

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1nuo0fj/...

For real dev work... essentially special sheds with massive ventilation to handle thermal runaways, rated by amount of kwh.

Distance, so a separate building far enough away from anything you want to keep that it won't carry over. Cabling underground but not in a duct. Space the cells a bit and ensure good airflow between them. A single runaway cell is how it usually starts and that in turn usually first shows up as increased internal resistance. Avoid mixing capacities, brands, different internal resistance values, cells that self-discharge, cells that have any sign of physical abuse or damage. (The guy in the video totally misses the internal resistance angle, as well as the self discharge which takes a long time to test and he already spent two months or more on his power bank.) Weld, do not solder your connections. Assemble cell groups first and then do QA on the cell groups as if they are larger capacity cells, and monitor them with a FLIR for any sign of cells misbehaving, especially under larger cell group charge/discharge currents. If a cell in the center is more than a few degrees warmer than those on the outside that's a serious concern.

Other prevention measures: strict inbound QA on the cells.

That's a lot of work, to the point that if you value your time you are better off buying a factory made pack of a reputable because they will almost certainly do a better job than you will on the safety aspect.

Getting Lithium-Ion packs right (especially larger ones) requires more up-front funds in terms of gear (especially testing gear for large volumes of cells is quite pricey) as well. The only reason I would do another (big) pack is if the form factor or capacity I want is not available at all.

The brief flash of that 'rechargeable powerbank' in the video has so much wrong with it that it isn't even funny and that's before looking inside the pack. All of those crossing wires, brrr. And those modules in the linked video don't look much better. Oh, and he's got one cell group in there with fewer cells (13:26) so that pack will unbalance immediately during charge or discharge. Effectively the whole pack has as much capacity as that one smaller cell group times the number of cell groups. The lack of integrated balancing wires is another puzzle for me, crossing balancing wires is a major headache when building larger packs, you want the very best grade of wiring for that with vibration resistant insulation and some kind of wire guide to ensure the wires can't move or cross. The whole BMS setup looks like an afterthought, rather than that it was designed in.

Oh, no interlock on the two separate breakers for the inverter (configured to work in island mode) and the house power. Wait until someone engages both. You need a transfer switch there, not two separate breakers.

His remark that it all looks 'super dodgy' and that 'I do not recommend anybody ever builds a pack like this' is an interesting one: if you are aware of all that, why do such a crap job in the first place? If you are going to go through that much work you might as well do a proper job.

Meanwhile, this is really just an ad for JLPCB. Running around the house and the workshop at everything working is a bit cringe, it is as if that's just padding to extend the video runtime.

There are a million ways this can turn into a fireball, dont' try it, at least don't put it at home.

Don’t try this at home. Try it in someone else’s home first.

The creator of the video made this very clear already.

Never ever consider doing something like this.

There is a good reason why most home battery storage solutions are based on LFP batteries and not NMC as used in vapes.

LFP is a much safer chemistry that can withstand higher temperatures and won’t bust into thermal runaway like NMC.

> Never ever consider doing something like this.

Unless you're a hacker, and you like hacking on stuff, then by all means, read through all the warnings and please do consider doing similar to what OP did, it's a lot of fun and you'll learn a lot!

Eh, as a hacker who has wasted time on a lot of dumb stuff I would encourage people to not follow absolutely every obsession you have and think of the opportunity costs of new projects you take on.

As a hacker who never wasted a single minute of my life, yet did a lot of dumb stuff, I'd say your mindset is what's getting in your way, not the amount of dumb stuff you've done :)

The amount of e-waste in general is truly nauseating. My employer just cleaned 30 years of “junk” out of our in house IT “tech shop” and the number of working but obsolete computers that went out (many simply because they couldn’t support Windows 11) is sickening to me. The amount of carbon generated from the mining activities, steel production, etc. that went into producing “obsolete” computers has to absolutely dwarf any carbon “savings” you get by replacing them with more “efficient” machines. Especially when you consider that renewable power is taking over and many places aren’t burning coal to run the things anymore. A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.

> A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.

Replacing concentrated and highly optimized data center servers with 10-1000X as many old desktop computers idling away at 50-100W or more would be a terrible tradeoff. That would explode the energy usage by orders of magnitude.

I did the math a few years back on how long you would have to run old machines to (roughly) offset the carbon emissions instead of purchasing new hardware. This included all mining, refinement, manufacturing, shipping and electrical savings from more efficient processors.

A big part of this is the very intense amount of energy producing the silicon wafer from Quartz ingots. While they weigh only a few grams of the total machine they reside in, they have a very sizable impact on total energy.

Funnily enough, for most desktop computers it would take about 15 years of non-stop usage to manage this. That is if powered purely by Lignite/Brown Coal. Anything cleaner, so almost any other energy source, and you have to run them way longer. If purely on solar panels and their manufacturing carbon output, it moves into the centuries range.

The solar panels required energy to create, too. I don't think that it would take centuries for replacing Cray 1 with a Raspberry Pi 5 to pay for itself in carbon intensity, even if both are powered by solar panels. The Cray example is seemingly uncharitable, but the principal is the same because if the only relevant thing is solar power, then it should take centuries in that case too, right?

Any chance you could write this up and publish?

Unless you count in the effects of distributed solar and the environmental effects of building said datacenters in the first place. Many homes with solar produce more than they consume, and many homes pay for heat. Instead of new construction (concrete is another huge CO2 contributor) and AC units or pumping surface water for cooling, putting a server in your house is basically free heat and making use of an existing, underutilized resource.

I could run my entire rack off of one to two solar panels (decommissioned ones from a power farm might I add). Even that would take a few years to pay for itself (when you factor in the costs of mounting and permitting) and my power company over 80% renewables the last time I checked anyway.

"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops."

But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.

See my other reply, when people count energy costs they fail to take into account the existing sunk cost of producing said resources, and the energy from having to build out new infrastructure to create these “more efficient” datacenters.

It’s like when people replace their fridge with a “more efficient” one and wipe out any energy savings with the cost of the new fridge. The difference in energy use will not pay for the new fridge for many years and by then you’ve already replaced the new fridge with another newer “better” one.

The only energy cost that matters is to the operator. Old hardware costs more to run so why would I run it? That there was energy used to produce the device and the replacement is literally not a factor in the calculation.

no.

you have to go for TCO to justify upgrades. energy alone most of the time doesn't justify replacing old hardware.

factor in space (=rent), age related increase in failure rate (=servicing), computer power needs (=opportunity costs) then together with the energy needs you find good points in time to justify an upgrade.

energy is the least relevant of those.

[flagged]

Hah, smooth brain! (A little harsh, tho.)

My bad, i get in a mood on HN sometimes.

It's literally an economic pressure.

Even if they were the same efficiency the older takes up way more space.

Why would you pay for 5x the data center space? Surely building they out isn't energy cheap either

GP already replied in a sibling comment, so all I can add is another article about this in case you want to read more about it with concrete numbers: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...

No company in america is going to do this. These cheap asses will definitely won't pay 60/hr to an army of tecnhicians to macguyver together new servers from old trash. We would need to have a madmax level catastrophe where supply chains collapse to have this make economic sense. The labor is the biggest cost. I exclusively use clusters of old computer for all my stuff and honestly, it sucks yo. Everything break all the time

Exactly. Also space.

I suspect that if there was any reasonable amount of economic advantage to using old hardware we would see multiple organizations systematically building large datacenters out of the free hardware.

As a hobbyist, I would love to get my hands on more stuff like this. But I don’t see how it could be used for anything at scale.

Not sure how reassuring it is to you, but these computers often have a longer life on the used market, even resold multiple times. The laptops in my Hungarian household always come used, simply because they are selling here capable machines in beautiful condition, below 50% of the original market price. And when we need something new, they get resold as well.

Now of course, there are the videos from third world countries where they burn e-waste for gold, so it's not all dandy, but hey. At least we can be a little more conscious.

This you can apply to almost everything we have been doing in the last 50 years I guess.

We're constantly being told to buy new because 1) more energy efficient, 2) better in terms of safety, 3) more environmental friendly, 4) it was built with unhealthy materials, 5) a single component is harder to replace later it with more modern xyz, if you don't replace the entire system the component is part of, 6) costs are increasing, so do it now!

You just need to understand which of the items above is essential for you, impossible to say no to.

At least you can argue that computers got better and more efficient, but disposable vapes? I don't understand how they're still legal.

Isn't a lot of e-waste recyclable?

In some cases but the economics need to be improved. Companies don’t have to pay for the externalities so it’s often cheaper to build new things instead of recycling, but if that shifted we’d see a lot more capacity arise.

Yep, this is one of those things where it is technically possible but economically not yet.

There is a reason a lot of this stuff gets handled in the worst way possible, it is the only economics that work so far.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvq1rd0geo

I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to handle international shipping being so cheap. If there were mountains of nominally-recyclable stuff building up in Hoboken, I think we’d have some kind of tax or regulatory fix because it’s harder to ignore a problem which is that easy to document. When it’s being sent through four levels of subcontractor on the other side of an ocean, people can just choose not to see problems which don’t obviously affect their kids but whose fixes would raise prices.

Isn't that why so much of it ends up in the third world where they break it down and get the valuable parts out under horrible conditions?

Just like old cruise boats

recycling is not energy neutral and recyclable doesn't mean it gets recycled.

No but it does mean you can't assume every piece of e-waste has the same initial impact.

I think this is only going to get worse worse, as phones, tablets and PCs are broadly a solved problem these days (outside intensive tasks). Literally nothing wrong with the 15 year old imac I have except for apple no longer supporting the OS.

> We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.

If this is true and could be done economically, why is nobody doing this right now?

the solution ofcourse is to invent a strain of bacteria that absolutely devours this stuff.

ofcourse this very obviously leads into hollywood-esque tragicomedical cataclysms...

"whats that smell... flips mouse upside down oh damn, my mouse started rotting..."

If a laptop costs 1000 dollars to buy, it couldn't have used more than 1000 dollars worth of hydrocarbons to create, unless firms are operating at a loss, right? Yes, the laptop required mining lithium, mining steel, turning hydrocarbons into plastics, growing silicon crystals, photolithography for the chips, running the conveyor belts for the assembly lines, etc and all those things required electricity and the electricity was mostly provided by fossil fuels, but the total amount of fossil fuels used (when considering price) couldn't have exceeded the cost of the laptop, because that would mean that some firms are spending more on fuel than they're receiving in profit, and such firms in the general case don't survive long. So if you take the cost of the laptop and then convert that to the mix of hydrocarbons used for energy at the time of the product's manufacture, that gives you an absolute upper bound of how much embodied carbon that thing must represent. It also gives you a lower bound of how efficient something has to be before you've paid for the old thing being thrown out and the new thing being manufactured.

So consider this: you have a desktop from 2010, it cost 1000 dollars, and operated at 150 watts. You consider getting a laptop today for 500 dollars, and it would have twice the nominal performance and operates at 50 watts. The total amount of embodied carbon for both of those devices has to be less than $1,500 worth of carbon dioxide produced by hydrocarbons. It can't be higher than that. Then you consider the running cost of 150 watts per hour vs 50 watts per hour. Well, back in 2010, 1000 (2010) dollars could buy you about 6000 to 9000 kilowatt hours worth of electricity when adjusting for conversion rates and electricity cost in China. Today, 500 dollars can buy about 3500 to 6500 kilowatt hours depending on whether you're buying in the US or China. So in order for the embodied carbon to be paid off for the laptop vs the desktop, let's take 7500 kilowatts for the desktop (a fair midpoint) plus 5000 kilowatts for the laptop, and then divide that by the running difference in power of the two systems: 100 watts. So if you plan on operating the laptop continuously for 13 years, the carbon savings from the efficiency gain of the new device would offset any possible carbon generated from the old device. But the laptop is twice as powerful, and what I gave was an absolute upper bound, and cannot be taken as a good ballpark estimate for how much carbon was actually produced. In the example that I gave, there was a 15-year age difference between the old system and the new system. Depending on how the devices were used, it's reasonable to assume that the right time to have replaced the desktop was back in 2023. Depending on how you use your device, it may never end up paying itself off before using less carbon than the older device. Waste is possible. But if the new device is on longer than 125,000 hours, it will have. It's just a sanity check, but it's good to have an upper bound.

Well luckily according to Bill Gates the climate is not really an issue anymore [1]:

> There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:

> In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.

> Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.

Note that this is from someone who used to be one of the most focal "doomsday viewers", see for example [2] or [3].

[1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/home/home-page-topic/reader/three...

[2]: https://youtu.be/rhNxDp8e7p8

[3]: https://youtu.be/zrM1mcKmX_c

There is a huge amount of space between "not really an issue" and "it will not lead to humanity’s demise".

Like how folks cherry picks reports on health by focusing on fatalities rather than incidents.

It is like how you can have a car crash much safer nowadays than ever before, doesn't make car crashes fine or good.

Please also cite where he allegedly said that it's a doomsday event before you put up the strawman and debunk it with "look even this guy changed his mind"

Edit: The only concrete thing I've found in trying to seek through your tedious video links for 10 minutes (idk why I'm spending my time on this but here we are) is the claim that, instead of living healthily, we'd be "constantly dealing with the human and financial crises at a historic scale". That's in line with the text you've quoted: it'll not be the end of all humans but it's a serious consequence for all of us (but not evenly distributed, even if it affects everyone to some degree)

Sorry, I didn’t double check indeed. I posted the wrong TED talk from him, see [1] at 4:21. There he says we need to limit climate change by limiting population growth. I think this is quite a hypocritical stance from someone who flies private jet all year.

[1]: https://youtu.be/JaF-fq2Zn7I

New strawman! Now it's no longer "Gates changed his mind on it being an existential crisis" but "Gates wants population control"

The source again doesn't check out. He says:

- the formula at ~4:21: more people use more energy (I think that stands to reason)

- you hear laughter as he then says "one of these factors [in the formula] will have to get pretty near to zero". It seems exceedingly obvious to me that the next slide being about the people term of the formula is either a joke (and recognised as such by the other listeners) or a mistake about switching the slide too soon. If this is your evidence that Bill Gates wanted to solve climate by eradicating populations, it's going to need to be backed up somewhere else, preferably also by actions as he has put a lot of his money where his mouth is, that shouldn't be hard to find tangible evidence of

- 4:47 mentions how much we could reduce population growth by e.g. offering condoms and pills to people that otherwise don't have access to them, and by offering vaccinations to people that can't afford them (since better survival of parents causes lower birth rate)

As for whether it's hypocritical that he flies jets (to an unspecified amount), idk, if I could offset my emissions to negative a gigaton per year then I'd also feel like I'm doing my bit. It would still be better if he didn't fly, I can see how one calls him a hypocrite for that part and perhaps even agree, but in this context it seems like yet another angle to this argument seemingly designed to hate him no matter what he really says and does

Excellent reply. Having children is great, but no one can deny that when we had ours, times were different in almost every way. Our grandchildren have much more to think about and different ways to think about it. Governments, on the other hand, look at families with an agenda in mind. (As in future tax payers, soldiers and consumers. Personal freedoms be damned, like the over turning of RvW.) Population growth in my lifetime has not been good in almost every way. The lack of all birth control (if some governments have their way) will threaten all future generations.

Tiny standards in legislation (I'm looking at you EU) around the e-cig designs to ensure simple battery recycling would solve this. Then you make the consumer pay for the battery separately and you are done.

A simple deposit might fix this. Many countries already do this for glass bottles and cans. You get the money back when you return them for recycling.

Also could work for other e-waste (phones, tablets, etc.). For some goods like washing machines, this is already common. Extending that to other product categories might be doable.

It does put some additional work on shop owners that have to pay back those deposits and collect them. Which means additional bookkeeping and some mechanism that ensures they don't end up in the negative on deposits for goods bought in another shop. And of course the extra deposit means prices go up as well. Even if you get it back at the end of the product life, it is extra cost.

Vapes being thrown away casually on the street has a bigger underlying problem of littering not really having any consequences. Some people just dump their trash wherever and it's just considered normal (by them). Some big fines would be appropriate here in my view. It's negative behavior. It's easy to know when you are doing it wrong and pretty much inexcusable. The only reason people do this is that they are being sloppy and don't really care. If you are caught red handed dropping your trash where you shouldn't, it should have some consequences. I'm not a fan of the nanny state but this is an area where I wouldn't mind people being corrected quite a bit more than they currently are. I don't think this should be that controversial.

I once worked with someone who apparently thought they were supposed to throw their takeout out their car window after eating it. That's why they thought they saw people cleaning up the side of the roads every now and then.

Our whole team had to explain to them how this is littering and that isn't why those people exist.

And yes, this is what they had been told since they were a child.

Britain has already banned disposable vapes. You aren't allowed to sell a vaping device unless it can be re-used hundreds of times - everything on the market has to have a charging port and a user-replaceable coil or pod. Rightly or wrongly, the hardware is cheap enough that some people will treat a refillable vape as if it were disposable.

Other than criminal enforcement, I'm not sure how you'd meaningfully change the incentives for someone who is willing to throw a £5 electrical device in the gutter because they can't be bothered to take it home, recharge it and refill it with £0.20 worth of liquid.

> Other than criminal enforcement, I'm not sure how you'd meaningfully change the incentives for someone who is willing to throw a £5 electrical device in the gutter because they can't be bothered to take it home, recharge it and refill it with £0.20 worth of liquid.

Here in Denmark we are forced to pay a small deposit when buying bottles/cans of beverages, which is returned (in cash) when you return the bottle. The consequence is that you find zero beverage bottles lying around, since they’re collected and redeemed.

If we put a, say, similar $10 deposit on these vapes, I think we’d see the same effect here. One problem is that they’re smaller, so they’re harder to find for collectors.

Back in my day our batteries came in a bunch of standard sizes and you could just pop them in and out of a compartiment in your electronic devices. There were collection points at any grocery store, there was even a points scheme so you could get a video game from handing in used batteries [0]. Or you could get rechargeable ones.

I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek, this still exists but I don't understand why they don't make lithium batteries in AA / AAA size or whatever for things like vapes. Battery collection, replacement and recycling is / was a solved problem.

[0] https://archive.org/details/BATTERYCHECK

> around the e-cig designs to ensure simple battery recycling would solve this.

That's still not optimal at all, if they had any imagination we'd have

- standard e-cig bases

- powered by a 18650/AA/AAA depending on the model

- deposit on the consumable part

That way you get rid of single use battery and littering all at once.

Several European countries already have disposable vape bans.

[dead]

Incredible how wasteful we're being. Market-driven economy will doom us all

Edit: I'm not saying I have a better alternative, but this system is deeply flawed

Disposable products in general should be much better regulated by the countries of the world.

Interesting use of street lithium.

This is fire.

Now power the CT scanner used to screen for lung cancer.

The thought that disposable vapes are still not forbidden in my country (EU) is making me sick.

They are banned here in Australia, unfortunately it has created a huge black market for these things.

Almost every neighborhood now has a cigarette store that also sells gifts and US chocolates that are basically just fronts for this stuff. Black market vapes and cigarettes. Even the police in many parts here don't really enforce this stuff.

What I find even crazier than the batteries being disposed is that some of these have some decent processor tech in them. Like this one that has a 48Mhz ARM processor in. https://ripitapart.com/category/disposable-vape-hacks/

My reading of the WEEE directive is that no electrical equipment can be "disposable", it should all be recyclable and recycled.

Actual enforcement of this is non-existent. If you see a "disposable" vape discarded in the street, look for the crossed out bin logo.

There is a massive gulf between "be recyclable" and actually being recycled.

Depending on energy and cost intensive recycling, which can only ever capture a percentage of the waste, is silly. This kind of thing needs to be stopped at the source.

> no electrical equipment can be "disposable", it should all be recyclable

Disposable paper wrappers can be recycled. Is there no disposable paper anymore now?

What?

Exactly!

I didn't get that logic either

Manufacturers should be required to actually take back anything with that logo. You can buy so much stuff that becomes a serious problem to dispose of and that stupid logo is all that's required of the manufacturer. Cost of disposal would then get added to the price of the object, as it should to begin with!

Everything with a sealed, soldered battery makes me furious on this front. Every item with a battery that recharges through the device instead of having a battery door like a Game Boy is on a timer, and for no good reason other than planned obsolescence.

They are illegal now in the UK.

'illegal' in that manufacturers add on a usb port and the basic board to tick the reusable check box.

I'm still seeing almost as many of these cast on the streets as I did a year ago.

All of the disposables I've seen have USB ports for charging because they come with more juice than battery power sufficient to vape it all. You will have to recharge multiple times for one disposable. I'm not in the UK, but I have seen something of a shift to separating the battery component from the vape tank such that you can just buy a new disposable tank and reuse the batteries. Maybe something like that might work in the UK grey areas.

From what I know the law is passed already. And they will become illegal end of 2026.

In the EU/EEA or where?

On the other hand, free parts!

Everything is reusable if you're determined enough.

The problem is how do recover these parts from a heap of trash

i see more and more of them thrown in small streets and parks these days (FR).. if I had secure storage i'd take them just like that youtuber, alas

They are illegal in Australia, but they are all over the ground. Littered like cigarette butts. Only now instead of just being plastic and some slightly toxic substances. It's a whole e-waste package.

i did not know these existed. very sick indeed.

Not designed to be charged? So its also disposable?

Does he ever once mention where he gets all these disposable vapes or what we can do about stopping them from entering the landfills?

When I first read your comment, it makes it sound like you've been watching the video for 20 minutes and it wasn't mentioned once. Turns out he starts talking about it around the 2:00 minute mark...

Yeah he does, watch the video.

He started with festivals, but then he went to a vape shop and asked.